A Year in the Woods: The Diary of a Forest Ranger Read online

  A Year in the Woods

  The Diary of a Forest Ranger

  COLIN ELFORD

  With a Preamble by Craig Taylor

  HAMISH HAMILTON

  an imprint of

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  HAMISH HAMILTON

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  First published 2010

  Preamble copyright © Craig Taylor, 2010

  Text copyright © Colin Elford, 2010

  Illustrations copyright © David Holmes, 2010

  The moral right of the authors and the illustrator has been asserted

  All rights reserved

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

  ISBN: 978-0-14-192838-8

  To my parents, Sheila and Paul Elford

  ‘Colin would do well to keep his eyes

  on the blackboard rather than on the

  squirrels outside the windows!’

  Class teacher, County Junior School Report, July 1966

  Contents

  Preamble

  Glossary

  January

  February

  March

  April

  May

  June

  July

  August

  September

  October

  November

  December

  Acknowledgements

  Preamble

  One day a few weeks ago, Colin Elford travelled into London from Dorset and I spent a couple of hours with him talking about trees, forests and fallow deer. He doesn’t often dress up but on that day he wore a green tweed jacket. It was bought for his eldest daughter’s wedding but he was ordered to wear something a little more staid to that event, so it was only the second time he’d plucked it from his closet: the first occasion was a drinks party at his village hall. Usually Colin can be found at his place of work, which might broadly be defined as the woods stretching up into north and east Dorset and out into south-east Wiltshire. During one working day he might tramp through part of a four-thousand-hectare chunk of woodland. Another day he might work a seventy-hectare block of conifer forest ringed by hardwoods. Each of the areas of woodland has its own name, from Stonedown to Stoney Bottom, my own personal favourite being Vernditch, an old ditch covered in bracken and fern that lies between the villages of Broad Chalke and Martin.

  On official Forestry Commission documents Colin’s job title is ‘Wildlife Ranger’. His responsibilities, in addition to deer management, include inspecting fences, checking for rabbits, trapping and shooting squirrels, clearing ponds and maintaining dormice boxes. When he is out in the woods stalking deer in the summer months he wears a light loden jacket. In colder weather he favours moleskin trousers and a camouflage deerhunter. Most people who wear Barbour jackets or waterproof wax coats make a rustling noise when they move. Silence is important for Colin as he slips past brambles and broken ash limbs, keeping out of the direct sun and weaving in and out of the dappled shade. When he is stalking deer he takes note of the wind direction to ensure his scent doesn’t travel to the wrong nostrils. He usually walks the forest alone.

  Colin stalks in wellies with neoprene inserts. He walks in wellies and drives in wellies. ‘I live in wellies,’ he once told me. He swears by his thermal vest and if the day is bitterly cold he sometimes wears one of the two bala clavas his mother knitted for him a couple of years ago. They look silly, he admits, but are essential for anyone who has to spend hours in the cold, sitting fifteen feet above the forest floor in a high seat used to watch for deer. There are wintry days when the woodcocks float above and the ravens flap and he hears the pigeons close by. Sometimes owls come and sit near the seat, eager to observe a stranger in their midst. Depending on the day, Colin uses either his own Austrian rifle or a weatherproof German .243 calibre, provided by his employers. It’s completely black with plastic stock, as wood stock tends to swell after prolonged use in pouring rain. When it does continuously rain he sits in his high chair, cold and still and wet, as the wind rushes around him and the cool drops of water plink incessantly on the back of his neck while he tries to breathe calmly and watch the forest line for deer-like shapes. Those, he says, are the worst days for a deerstalker.

  Some of the best days come in autumn when the leaf cover is blown. There’s nothing better, he says, than getting up in the dark of a hard frost. There might be a cold wind pushing through the forest but it knocks the leaves off and Colin enjoys watching them flutter to the floor. Blustery wet weather does not make for good stalking, but it is exciting to listen to the sounds the forest throws up when the trees bend and the grunts and groans of the fallow buck resonate through the woods.

  Colin started his career in forestry in 1970 when he was seventeen. His father didn’t have a car at the time so his mother drove him to Charborough Park, a large estate in Dorset, to see the forester. He was the old type of forester, a man who won respect by never ordering a task to be done that he couldn’t do himself. ‘These guys were brown as berries,’ Colin told me. ‘They were fit from all that work. They had hard muscles and little patience. If you showed up five minutes late they were gone. There I was, small and straight out of school. My hands got blistered immediately and I would come home from each day, fall asleep in my clothes and sleep until morning.’ The forester told him to come back in a year’s time when he had grown, so Colin worked roofing houses in the Bournemouth area and reappeared in the forest a year later with a little more muscle and a head of long hair. ‘The forester asked me to cut my hair so it wouldn’t get caught in a machine we used called a peeler,’ Colin said. ‘But I think he just wanted me to cut my hair.’

  Colin is now fifty-three. At five foot seven he’s not massive. Stocky, perhaps, but not fat, he says, certainly not with all the walking he does. He can still fell and plant like a trained woodsman but his hands are softer than they have been in the past. Years ago, when he and the other men were working the forest with long-handled hooks called slashers, his hands became calloused, cracked from the wood resin and rough from dragging rusty chains through mud. Colin was always self-conscious about them when he handed over money for a pint at the pub. Sometimes he’d ask his wife to go to the bar instead.

  When it comes to the forests of Dorset there is no fixed number for the amount of deer that need to be c
ulled each year. Instead, Colin takes his cues from the land and, while conducting a survey, checks whether the smaller trees are browsed by hungry deer mouths, whether the butterflies are plentiful and the brambles are growing. ‘People get hung up on figures,’ he said. ‘If the habitat starts to look like a lawn I know to put the cull up. There is never just a simple number. I’m not keen to shoot to kill.’ But he does know how to follow a deer in his rifle sight, he knows how to shoot, and he can recognize the bubbly pinkish lung blood that leaks from a startled animal if his aim is true. He knows that a sure sign of an amateur is when a hunter aims for the deer’s head. After working with the animals for thirty-six years and culling for thirty-four, when he finds food in the mouth of a just-culled deer he knows to be pleased the animal didn’t see the end coming, the shot was quick, and the job done well.

  When he writes about the forest, Colin uses an A4 notebook with the phases of the moon printed on the pages. He writes in pen. Years ago he was offered a Dictaphone but decided his voice sounded a little too weird, a little too much like Worzel Gummidge, when he whispered into a recorder in the dark. Instead he holds details – cream veins on an ivy leaf – in his head until he gets a pen in hand. At home, after bathing and checking for ticks, especially under his watch strap, he sits down in front of an old second-hand Forestry Commission computer and tries to write a page a night. He has to be in the right mood, and not too tired. Sometimes his wife leans over and says to him: ‘Put a full stop there.’ Colin has been married to Nicola for thirty-three years. She knew from the beginning, when they met aged sixteen, what life would be like with a forest ranger. A romantic night out with Colin tends to involve an activity such as badger watching. He could, theoretically, lie on a beach while on holiday, but he wouldn’t last long. He can’t turn off from thinking about the wildlife in his woods.

  Colin is talkative. Sometimes when I speak to him on the phone an hour passes easily and he inevitably throws a detail into conversation that makes me miss standing under a canopy of trees. He has Stoney Bottom; here, in the city, the best I can do is seek out the weak imitative of a tree-lined street or a manicured park. Though he has no problem keeping up conversation Colin doesn’t seek out companionship on the job. ‘I’m not a loner but I prefer to be alone. I find it hard working every day with somebody,’ he said during one phone conversation, and then he paused. ‘Oh, look at that,’ he finally continued. ‘I’m just watching a buzzard out my kitchen window. He’s displaying. That’s an interesting sight.’

  On the day of his London trip I asked Colin why forests mean so much to him. ‘I could never have enough of being in the forest,’ he replied. ‘I love it so much. Each forest, even the urban ones, has a feeling or a vibe. Forests have moods. Only once have I been in one and felt like I had to leave. That was the power of that forest’s mood. One night, in a field, I shot two deer and I had to drag them about a mile to the truck. I’m not scared of the dark but the ash trees were cracking above in the wind, the will o’ the wisp – the ground fog – went whooshing past. A fox barked. I remember the glow over the trees.’ It was the one time he felt he was being watched and it set him on edge. Usually the forest has the opposite effect, calming him and filling him with a sense of belonging. ‘As a boy, if I was ever upset, I loved to go out to the woods,’ he said. ‘It made me feel better. I can’t say exactly what attracts me to a forest. On a lovely day, or one that starts with a cold frost, I still think, I’ve got to get out there.’

  Craig Taylor

  Glossary

  beating up replacement of trees that have died shortly after planting

  brashing removal of lower branches from the base of a tree (in forestry up to two metres)

  browsing eating of buds and young tree shoots

  bumping disturbing or surprising a deer from cover

  buttalo small soft plastic device, which when squeezed mimics the call of a doe on heat or fear-stricken young deer

  call attract male deer at the mating season by various methods, including ‘deer calls’, wooden or plastic instruments, which when blown through imitate various calls of deer; and a ‘beech leaf call’, produced by blowing on a beech leaf held on edge and stretched between forefinger and thumb, which imitates the pheep of a roe deer

  canopy roof of the forest, formed by the crowns of the tallest trees

  clear fell harvesting and regeneration method that removes all trees within a given area

  coppice management based on regeneration by regrowth of cut stumps (coppice stools)

  corvids birds belonging to the family Corvidae, i.e., crow, raven, rook, jackdaw, magpie, jay and chough

  cover vegetative shelter for wildlife from predators and inclement weather

  cull management of deer numbers by controlled shooting

  emparked kept within the boundaries of an enclosed area of land

  fallow species of deer

  fraying damage caused by deers’ antlers on the bark of trees – usually to mark territory or remove unwanted velvet

  glassing focusing on an object through binoculars or a spotting scope

  gralloching removal of the stomach and other internal organs from a shot deer

  hazel mock group of hazel shoots from a single stem

  high seat raised, laddered structure made of wood or metal used to watch or shoot deer from; can be permanently fixed or portable

  leader forestry term for a year’s lateral (top) growth on a tree

  lop and top unproductive woody debris left over from a cutting operation

  mire year-round waterlogged shallow peat area of low-lying ground

  natural regeneration young seedlings that have arisen from seed falling near by

  overstood hazel hazel taken out of a rotation of coppicing

  pricket male deer in his second year

  pronking stiff, strutting gait

  rack cleared track within a forest crop used for timber extraction

  restock site re-establishing an area by planting, generally following recent clear-fell operations

  ride open track or break separating plantations within the woodland

  roding displaying flight and croaking call of a male woodcock

  roe species of deer

  scrapes lair or place where a deer ‘beds’ or, in the case of fallow, ‘lodges’

  sika species of deer

  squirrel hopper L-shaped tunnelled container holding poisoned bait

  stand area constant in location used by fallow deer (rutting stand)

  thinning tree-removal practice that reduces tree density and competition in a given area. The remaining trees grow more vigorously; thinning benefits wildlife by increasing light values to the forest floor, encouraging ground vegetation

  torpid state of torpor (moribund and inactive) as the body cools to a little above its surroundings

  tush anal hair tuft found on roe doe

  unbrashed lower unpruned branches of a tree (usually dry and dead)

  understory shrub layer below the forest canopy that receives little light

  velvet furry membrane covering growing antlers

  January

  It’s early, and in the dark I stagger to find the door handle to the kitchen. A blast of wind and rain throws itself at the kitchen window. I peer out, tea in one hand, and stare into the darkness, judging the opposition.

  Outside I point to the open door of my truck, and both dogs quiver in anticipation, waiting for my command. I say the word – ‘Up’ – and Kiesal, my Bavarian bloodhound cross, and Liv, the black Labrador, respond instantly, leaping eagerly into the vehicle. Over the years my truck has become a mobile kennel, office and portable deer larder. Within it I store and carry the everyday tools and equipment that I need: binoculars, shooting sticks, torches and knives, as well as the winch, a selection of pulleys and ropes, plus a rucksack for carrying smaller deer out of the forest. It is as natural for me to take my rifle to work as it is for a carpenter his hammer.

  When I
drive off there’s plenty of debris on the road. Large fully leaved branches and small leafless sticks lie shattered, strewn on the smooth, dark, wet tarmac surface. Hand-sized leaves scatter as I pass over them, involuntarily drawn up to the headlights and cast away in the updraught.

  As I unlock the barrier to the forest, I glance back at the truck. Spots of rain fall, caught in the headlights – the only light in the gloom. A pigeon flutters away in the dark as I shut the truck’s door. I drive slowly up the track, deeper into the centre of the forest. Beyond the headlights it looks inhospitable outside and pelting rain smashes against the windscreen.

  Picking the best time to leave between showers, I make my way to the high seat in this area of wood. I climb the sodden structure and sit quietly, surveying my view as the rear of my trousers sucks up the cold moisture from the bench seat. Up here, the owls are calling all around me. It’s dark, real dark, ink dark. After misjudging my timing I have managed to get to the seat too early. In the forest there’s no light, no colour. At this time of the morning there are merely shades, shades of blacks and lighter shades of greys, but no browns or greens, the natural colours of the forest.